Getting Started with Vidmy

Step 1: Prepare your Video Library

Upon signing up for your Vidmy account you will be directed to the Admin Panel, the place where you manage your site away from your site visitors.

Before you start to import videos from YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and other supported websites, it might be a good idea to start creating categories for organizing your website's content. Since we are going to build a "Music Hits" website for this tutorial, we will start by creating categories for the different music genres. To start creating categories click on the "Categories" section from the left side menu.

In the Categories section, start adding a new category by entering the category name and then pressing "Create Category".

After you click "Create Category", you will then be re-directed to the new category's edit page. There you can edit the category name, description, visibility and SEO settings as well. Once you are ready to start adding more categories, just click on the "Categories" link at the top of the page to get back to the categories page.

Here is how the categories page looks after we finished adding all the categories

Categories appear in the same order on the website as they appear on the Categories page. If you don't like the current order, you can change by dragging and dropping categories from one place to the other. Make sure you press "Save" after re-arranging the categories. Here is how our website looks so far:

Step 2: Build your Video Library

Now that we have laid down the website content structure, it's time to start adding videos. Click on the "Add Videos" shortcut at the top of the page (or go to Videos > add new). In addition to the ability to import a single video from the "Import from URL" option, you can also bulk import videos from YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo by clicking on their tabs.

We'll start by adding a single YouTube URL in the "Import Single Vide" section.

After clicking the "Import" button, you will be presented with the video data, which you can edit before finally publishing to your website. Make sure to select a category from the "Category" dropdown menu for the video to appear under (remember the categories we previous created?).

When you are done press "Add Video" and the video will immediately become available on your website. Now let's try to import more videos, this time using YouTube's "Import from Search Results" option. Let's search YouTube for the all-time most viewed videos in the "Music" Category.

After you click search you will be presented with the results that you can easily import simply by clicking on the check box and selecting the video category (or just select the category to use for all the videos from the "Auto populate" options). You also have the option to edit the video title (just click on it) and description. Once you are done selecting and editing the videos, click on the "Add videos".

This is how our website looks like after we added some videos:

In addition to showing the categories you previously added, you will also find a special section called "New Videos", which automatically lists the latest videos posted on your website. Also, on the right side bar, there is the "Popular Videos" widget which lists the most popular videos based on the number of views.

Step 3: Customize the Website Appearance

Now that you have your site content in place, it's time to start customizing the site's appearance. Go to the Themes section.

The Themes page shows several themes to pick from. The currently used theme can be identified through the green "Active" label.

When move the mouse over any of the themes, you will be shown the "Customize" and "Demo" buttons. The customize button allows you to start customizing the selected theme before finally applying it to your website, while the demo button shows you an actual live site using that demo.

Pressing the "Customize" button on the theme you are interested in. You can always play around with other themes later.

Theming options are divided into different tabs that expand upon clicking on them. Click on any of the tabs to expand the option under it. If you want to change the color of the Page Title, for example, we can easily click on the color box and select the desired color from the colors palette.

If you want to test how the changes will look like before your site visitors can see them on the website, click on the "Preview before saving" button. Once you are ready to make all the changes visible to the public, just click the "Save" button. After some tweaking and playing around, your website is finally ready! Check out our example site here: http://www.musichits.vidmy.com